ICO

Secure messaging service Telegram is canceling its initial coin offering (ICO), an anonymous source told TheWall Street Journal today, and it won’t be opening up its digital coins for public sale. The cancellation is a blow to public investors who hoped to get in on the ground floor of one of the largest cryptocurrency investment opportunities in history, with an estimated $1.7 billion already raised.

Another source cited in the Journal partially attributed the shutdown to increasingly tight regulations that the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and other lawmakers have proposed since Telegram initially began planning an ICO.

Much has changed in the regulatory environment since January when rumors swirled that Telegram was contemplating an ICO. In February, SEC chairman Jay Clayton had harsh words for ICOs that dodged registering with the SEC. “Many ICOs are being conducted illegally,” Clayton said, testifying before Congress. “Their promoters and other participants are not following our security laws.” In March, reports surfaced that the SEC sent subpoenasto dozens of cryptocurrency companies including tech companies that had launched ICOs.

It could also be the case that Telegram has simply raised enough money in private sales that it no longer needed an ICO. Telegram’s first presale in February raised $850 million from 81 investors; in March, the company said it had successfully raised another $850 million from 94 investors in a second round. In total, Telegram raked in $1.7 billion from fewer than 200 private investors.

The money is supposedly going toward Telegram’s Open Network project that will continue to fund its messaging platform and develop new features. The network would be built with a public ledger that would eventually serve as an alternative to Visa or Mastercard, Telegrampromised.

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The famous messaging service Telegram has unexpectedly cancelled its Initial Coin Offering (ICO), which was announced several times in the last months. The information has been revealed by The Wall Street Journal on May the 2nd.

Telegram Cancels ICO

One of the most important Initial Coin Offerings of all times has been cancelled. The Telegram Open Network (also known as TON), has been encouraging investors to place their money in one of the biggest opportunities for the year. Until now, the company raised $1.7 billion dollars.

Apparently, due to the tight regulations that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) may implement, Telegram decided to stop its plans to build the project.

Since TON has been announced, the SEC has sent subpoenas to different crypto-related companies, and informed that ICOs could be considered as securities. Back in February, SEC chairman Jay Clayton said that ICOs are being conducted illegally and that ICO founders are not following the security laws established.

At the same time, Telegram could have simply raised the money needed through its private sale. In this case, the company would no longer need an ICO. Between February and March, the company raised $1.7 billion dollars with less than 200 private investors. An important sum considering that some ICOs would just develop good products for less than half of this amount.

If Telegram’s ICO is suspended, it does not mean that its projects for the TON are totally cancelled. Indeed, it could be developing this product without necessary asking for more investments.

Telegram Open Network aims to create a platform that will handle transactions, that would be scalable, user friendly and that would provide its users with a virtual currency for transactions and other uses.

According to Anton Rozenberg, a former Telegram’s employee, the virtual currency would be used to aid users that live in oppressive governments, and the platform would be used to create smart contracts, among other things. Moreover, the company would launch a light wallet that would allow individuals to easily store their currencies.

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The virtual currency born from a fork of Bitcoin (BTC) and ZClassic (ZCL), Bitcoin Private (BTCP), has been listed on HitBTC. The information is very important for the BTCP community that has been working very hard in order to spread the knowledge about Bitcoin Private.

Bitcoin private Listed on HitBTC

Good news for the Bitcoin Private community that now will be able to trade their favourite virtual currency on HitBTC. HitBTC is the 12th most important virtual currency exchange in the market with a trading volume of $344.84 million dollars. The most important trading pairs are BCH/BTC, BTC/USDT, and ETH/BTC, accounting for almost 50% of the total trading volume of the exchange.

At the same time, HitBTC made an interview with the team of BTCP, which has been published on HitBTC’s blog shortly after the announcement of the listing.

Bitcoin Private’s team said:

“What sets Bitcoin Private aside from other Bitcoin forks is that it is the first to bring mathematically provable privacy technology to the Bitcoin community. Another big differentiator when compared to other Bitcoin forks that is often times overlooked is that of the open source development community itself. The BTCP team has by far the most active development team among any of the Bitcoin forks, and in just under 60 days after the mainnet launch it has already proven to be the only Bitcoin fork dedicated to bringing the best privacy technology to a mainstream adoption level.”

Bitcoin private is a privacy-focused bitcoin it’s a fork of ZClassic (ZCL), combining the Unspent Transaction Output (UXTO) of ZCL, with that of Bitcoin (BTC). The snapshot of both ZClassic and Bitcoin blockchain was taken on February the 28th and holders of each virtual currency were eligible for Bitcoin Private (BTCP) cryptocurrencies at a 1:1 ratio.

The tweet reads as follows:

“Bitcoin private ($BTCP), a community-driven BTC/ZCL fork consisting of over 150 contributors, is now listed on #HitBTC. We would like to thank all the $BTCP community for your support, vigilance and team spirit. Trade $BTCP: hitbtc.com/exchange/BTCP-…”

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An unexpected move taken by South Korean lawmakers has shaken the crypto market. Apparently, they are working on a bill that would legalize some Initial Coin Offerings, which the country banned back in 2017. During the last months, companies from South Korea moved abroad to start Initial Coin Offerings.

Lawmakers to Legalize ICOs

Back in September/October 2017, South Korea decided to ban ICOs, following China’s decision. Both Asian countries wanted to have control over the crypto market and the tokens created by companies that wanted to raise funds. But it has created several problems. Enterprises in these countries decided to move their operations abroad in order to start gathering funds for their projects.

According to the Korea Times, 10 lawmakers are working in order to present a bill that would challenge the ICO ban imposed by the government last year.

Rep. Hong Eui-rak of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, said during a forum about ICOs and blockchain technology:

Of course, the bill will not rule to completely open the market for ICOs. The intention is to allow ICOs initiated by public organizations and research centres that are committed to promoting and developing distributed ledger technology. At the same time, these ICOs will be subject to supervision by the Financial Services Commission and the Ministry of Science and ICT.

This is the first step before allowing all compliant ICOs to operate in the Asian country. The government’s intention with the ICO ban was to create proper regulations before it was too late.

Initial Coin Offerings have been used by enterprises all over the world to get the necessary financing for their projects. It was very easy to start an ICO, and gather funds for an expansion or launching a new service or product. At the same time, some ICOs were totally scams and some of them were completely fake. Investors who bet on them lost all their investment and did not hear from the team members never again.

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The current consensus mechanisms with PoW and PoS face the problem of being too slow. Ethereum’s 13 transactions per second and lack of scalability make its uneconomic use questionable in the future. Alternatives like NEO and EOS exist but bring along their own disadvantages. Currently, most businesses run their platforms on Ethereum and changing to a different blockchain is difficult.

Ethereum: 7-15 tps,🛴 GoChain: 1300 tps

Gochain is a decentralized cryptocurrency and blockchain that is compatible with Ethereum, but faster. You can use it with current Ethereum wallets, smart contracts and decentralized applications.

To allow 100 times more transactions per second, it relies on Proof of Reputation to reach consensus, which is a stronger and more secure version of Proof of Authority. This algorithm will be far more energy efficient, needing about 0.001% of the power used to currently mine Ethereum. Also, the nodes will be spread geographically, to prevent them from being taken over by governments or, like currently, being pseudo-decentralized with the majority of the miners being in China.

They already built 1M/s solutions and have a 1000/s testnet

The team consists of founders, long-term investors and software engineers with years of experience in distributed cloud systems and high scale applications.

Team

The team is lead by Jason Dekker, who was a hedge fund manager who has managed in excess of $250 million, angel investor, board member and advisor with an exit to a public company.

Chief Solution architect Travis Reeder has over 20 years of experience developing high-throughput, high scale applications and cloud services and has founded successful technology companies and has raised tens of millions in funding from some of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley

Verdict (8/10)

There is a strong need for high scale and robust blockchains and GoChain is a step in the right direction. The testnet and mainnet updates at a pre-ICO stage is a very positive sign and the team behind the project is strong.

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In the real world, companies can always secure funds by approaching angel investors and venture capitalists but by doing that, they would have to give away a share of their equity to them. What companies wanted, was to get a lot of funds without giving away equity and ownership. The only way that they could do that was by going public.

The way companies do this is by holding an IPO aka Initial Public Offering. How does an IPO work?

In an IPO a private company basically decides to put up its private shares up for sale to the general public. Anyone anywhere can buy the shares of the company. Initially, these shares are dirt cheap and if the company hits it big then there is a chance of your shares ballooning up to exorbitant prices. We have all heard stories of the masseuse who became a multi-millionaire after her 500 “useless” stocks in Google matured over time.

So, people started wondering what would happen if we used the same concept and put it on a blockchain based environment. This is what gave birth to the concept of ICOs. ICOs are pretty similar to IPOs but with 3 major differences.

Firstly, the ICO was decentralized with no central authority, secondly, the ICOs lacked the tedious red tape that most IPOs were bogged down by and finally, they were unregulated while IPOs have always under been heavy regulation. Now there was a problem that blockchain based companies were facing when it came to ICOs. In an IPO, the investors got shares in return of their investment. What would a blockchain based company give away in exchange of capital? They had to invent the blockchain equivalent of a share and that was when they came up with the idea of “Tokens”.

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Japan has now proposed guidelines with the view of legalizing ICOs in the country.

The report states:

“ICO is still in its infancy and has no industry practices yet. Appropriate rules must be set to enable ICO to obtain public trust and to expand as a sound and reliable financing method. Based on a shared awareness of this necessity, financial institutions, non-financial companies, and venture companies have co-founded the ICO Business Research Group.”

The set guidelines are as follows:

“ICOs should be designed to be acceptable to existing shareholders and debt holders.”

“ICOs should not become a loophole in existing financing methods as equity finance.”

The ICO Business Research Group proposed five trading principles:

“Token sellers should confirm the identity (Know Your Customer: KYC) and suitability of customers.”
“Administrative companies that support the issuance of tokens should confirm the KYCs of issuers.”
“Cryptocurrency exchanges should define and adopt an industry-wide minimum standard on token listing.”
“After tokens are listed, unfair trade practices of such tokens such as insider trading should be restricted.”
“Parties related to the trading of tokens such as issuers, administrative companies, and token exchanges should make efforts to ensure cyber security.”